Didn't get a t-shirt; didn't even get the code to pass -c but didn't get any useful info by adding strict, warnings, diagnostics, etc. ad nauseum.

Proofread... repeatedly. To no avail. (Remember: the one-eyed man is king in a world of the blind)

Lo and behold: your wiki ref led me eventually to a Stevenson site where I found this:

13. Hey, the perl script doesn't work! What's the deal?

The production people at the publisher tried valiantly to get the perl script typeset without any errors, but one error did slip in. It is located on the eighth line. Where the book says$o=~s/.chr((and so on, it SHOULD say$o=~s/./chr((
and so on.

I second (or third or forth or whatever) this nomination. Between Cryptonomicon and "In the begining there was the command line" Stephenson in my mind personifies perl, and the open source software movement in SciFi.

They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

It's not Sci-fi, but for me it would be Terry Pratchett. The DiscWorld is messy, flawed, anarchic, but in the end a bunch of semi-random characters make it work nevertheless, by understanding its true nature (and the law of Narrative Causality of course). A bit like Perl indeed.

Yep, definetly Terry Pratchett. The only author making me laugh out loudly while reading in a train ... The Disc World is also funny and with a lot of analogies. Doesn't NodeReaper look like Pratchetts DEATH ?!

2010-07-04

It would be most un-Asenion to meet your challenge openly without first giving the Gentle Reader an opportunity to exercise his mind. Perhaps a hint is in order.

One association I make between Dr. Asimov and Perl is blatant and obvious; one is personal and subjective; one is sublime and esoteric.

I shall reveal my associations after giving fellow Perlers and Trufans a little time to think.

2010-08-07:

Now that another poll has opened, here is my reply to ambrus' demands. This poll is a little like "Which politician reminds you of a banana"; a little subjective. Let's roll up our sleeves and look for objective grounds.

The Three Laws of Robotics

The Laws have had a great effect on engineers of my generation, those of us who read SF and went into fields in which we hoped to build mechanical men. I commonly tacked up the Laws over my desk or workbench, next to the other Three Laws (of Thermodynamics). One list was a reminder of a higher purpose in my work; the other was a reminder of the inflexible nature of certain limits.

Prior to Asimov, robots were viewed as monsters; as late as the 1960's, computers were seen by the public as threatening; offensively ruthless, rigid, and stupid. Jokes about utility customers being spindled, folded, and mutilated had the air of graveyard whistling. I maintain that the entire Information Age, with small, decentralized, personalized and 'friendly' computing, has, to a large part, been a grandchild of Asimov's vision, with ourselves, the metathinking engineers, its parents.

Specifically Perlish implementations of the Laws include such things as taint mode, Do What I Mean, and automatic garbage collection. The direct connections may be tenuous but are obvious. The common link is the philosophy of machine serving man; not man fearing machine, machine out of control, or useless machine with burning wiring and smoking oil.

Character of the Man and his Works

Asimov was well known for his hacker-like work habits: long hours at the anachronistic typewriter. He exemplified laziness, impatience, and hubris: He strove to produce perfect works, so he would not need to fix them later; he imagined worlds of the future instead of waiting for someone to build them; he was famously immodest.

The Good Doctor was a legitimate Ph.D.; he was no mere spinner of tales but a professor at the chalkboard. Besides his SF, he wrote authoritative science fact and quite a few mysteries. He had the sort of broadness of interest I see in CB or other gatherings of computer professionals, where no topic is off-topic. I believe he would have held his own in any heated YAPC gathering.

Asimov's writing style is technical. He's been described as a humanist -- described himself that way -- but his actual work is a bit dry. Bradbury is humanist; he wrote a whole story around the smell of a new pair of kid's sneakers. Heinlein is political; each book seems to enlarge his Utopia. Niven gets the science right but is essentially a comedian. (No offense; I love his stuff.) Clarke and Herbert are mystics. Asimov, despite his pun-filled limericks, wrote the hardest of hard SF and always got the science right.

The works themselves are often quite short (connect to Perl golf) and have complex, even recursive narrative structures (connect to Perl poetry).

The Key

Anyone who has read much of Asimov's short fiction can think of a dozen similar illustrations. This is my favorite.

In The Key, Asimov's Sherlock, Dr. Wendell Urth cracks a mystery that only begins with a cryptic message, found on the Moon near a man's dead body, partially decoded as Go to Earth. The rest of the (critically important) message is a confusing jumble of puns and possible clues. Dr. Urth explains:

I would consider the robotic laws, and Asimov's extensive biography exploring those laws, to be far more Python-like than Perl-like. Would Asimov have used Perl as an inspiration for the laws, there would be 4327 of them (251 of them failing if 'strict' is enabled), half of them working differently on weekends, on full moons, or in countries having red in its flag. Oh, and in each new book, there'll be new laws. And in the new series Asimov has been working on for a decade (with an army of co-authors), 3287 laws have either been changed or removed, and 28439 new ones will be added.

Most often a collection of small works which tend to hang together in an anarchic sort of way. The style is frequently obtuse and it's difficult to work out just what the hell is going on but repays close attention nonetheless.

*caveat* I suggested the last 3 authors on the list (however my full explanations did not make the poll :( ).

Given this, however, I think I did a grave disservice by not adding PK Dick to the list. I can't think of another SF author who's short stories inspired more movies (many of which were summer headliners in their day). At least for me, whenever I am confronted with a computational problem, I am almost always inspired most easily when I think about 'the perl way' to solve it. I think Dick best embodies the inspiration of creativity, and therefore best embodies perl.